If the rumours are true, and if this Pastebin post (be sure to mirror the key if that won't get you in trouble with your authorities) is legitimate, then it looks like High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection has been cracked so hard its mother's mother felt it. HDCP is a copy protection mechanism which protects the audio and video streams sent over DisplayPort, HDMI, and DVI.

I'm pretty sure that after years of DRM schemes being cracked, the industry is aware that any DRM will be cracked; anything stated in public to the contrary is pure rhetoric, we shouldn't be so naive as to believe that when a company states that their encryption is unbreakable that they actually mean that.

Duh, like I said, they're lies. Marketing lies. Lies which some people believe will "protect" their crap. While in reality, in the end, it won't do shit.

But if they fully expect them to be cracked within a relatively short amount of time, then why the living f*** waste money, over and over and over again, on DRM schemes that are known to be bogus?

After all, a user NEEDS the key to decrypt the data. The key is basically GIVEN to them, though in a purposely hard-to-find way. Once found, all bets are off... period. And this is destined to happen.

You can't practically give a person a key and not expect them to use it to their own benefit, to be able to use the data that THEY JUST BOUGHT to make personal copies for their own devices.

Never mind piracy; if you make your movies enough of a pain in the ass to watch in all their glory, people *will* try to find better ways to get them. And that is where the so-called "pirates" come in.

Too bad the pirates provide a better, more trouble-free product than the DRM-loving producers of the content themselves.